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Somara
Somara, the Twinned City, is an Eastern city famed for its deluge of oracles and seers, as well as producing clockwork mechanisms of the highest quality. Seers claim that Somara's moniker stems from it being rooted in the present yet dealing with the future, while the local metalworkers snort and say the prophets are simply trying to pretend the clockwork trade doesn't exist. Founding Nobody knows for certain when Somara was founded; the ratcheteers and gearmakers are more concerned with keeping their accounts in order than to write history books and the seers are too busy predicting the future to care about the past. Common consensus holds that Somara began as a small gathering of oracles who eventually attracted enough traffic to settle down. Economy The Somaran economy can be split deftly into goods and services, even more so than most other economies. Clockwork, from airship parts to timepieces, are exported in great quantity on a day-to-day basis. The high degree of craftsmanship makes forgery near-impossible and adds value to the clockwork goods, to the point that if one is able to craft imitations, it's likely that you can garner more profit from regular employment. As a result, iron ores and precious metals used in metalworking constitute a large portion of the Somaran import market. The miners of Ahnheim and their elemental associates under the Ahnnim Range are one of Somara's most important, if not the most important, trading partners. Other clockwork specialties include strongboxes and eccentric contraptions such as the gambling tables of the Somaran casinos. On the other side, the density of haruspices and thaumaturgy has created a thriving market for predictions and fortune-telling. While most seers officially have no price and claim to live on offerings, supplicants are well aware of the importance of offertory sacrifices. This in turn has created an intense demand for cattle, from sheep to chickens of every conceivable variant. It is not unusual to see entire herds of livestock crowding out boulevards on a market day. Between the inflow of cattle, supplicants and metal caravans, Somara is a city of hustle and bustle to rival any of the Western Capitals. Religion While Somara is filled to the brim with oracles and seers, few, if any, claim explicitly to receive visions from the gods or any deities. Spirituality without recourse to a higher power is at the very least implied to hold dominant thought amongst the 'religious' elite, but any suggestion of blasphemy is vehemently denied. The trend of the priests and seers is to ignore any mention of the divine, except in vague references, and the oracles promote themselves rather than a religious power. For example, one of the more prominent seers, oracle Dephin, has been known to comment disparagingly that "her services are far more sophisticated" and that "she, unlike that whore Vileva further down Temple Street, won't fake divine ecstasy at the sight of gold". Religion in Somara, if it exists in the same form as in other lands, is reclusive and hidden under the materialistic trade of prophecies and cryptic visions.